The piece references a survey which indicates that nearly 1/3 of the 25 y/o to 34 y/o live with mommy and daddy. Apparently, these children aren’t vile enough to be paid to go away. Or mommy and daddy don’t have the resources to do so.

The survey is called,

The Boomerang Generation

Feeling OK about Living with Mom and Dad

Here’s a quote from the piece……

But just because more young adults are moving in with their parents doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Andi Cooper, 31, a communications specialist from Ridgeland, Miss., who recently moved in with her parents, says people shouldn’t feel sorry for her. “I’m extremely happy,” she says. And she’s not alone. Some 78% of those surveyed in the Pew study say they’re satisfied with their living arrangements and 77% feel upbeat about their future finances. “If there’s supposed to be a stigma attached to living with Mom and Dad through one’s late 20s or early 30s, today’s boomerang generation didn’t get that memo,” Parker says. It may also be part of a larger cultural shift: People are also getting married later in life and flying the coop later, Qian says.

Yes, I would have been upbeat about my finances if when I was 34 y/o my parents were still supplying me room and board. What sort of loser generation are these people raising?

On a personal note, my youngest graduated college this year. I was anticipating having her for a while. I should have known better. She found herself a little job down south. It doesn’t pay much of anything, but she’s doing it on her own. She has a solid “I can do it on my own” attitude. She’s taking a brief respite before heading back for her masters. Her father couldn’t be prouder. While I was willing, she never asked. She just went and did, made her own plans and made them work. She doesn’t sit around hoping for change, she creates change which lends to hope.

Of course, we can wallow in self-pity here, but it is worth noting, that as bad as things are here, there are places much worse.

The unemployment rate across the 17 countries that use the euro remained at a record high of 11.3 percent in July, official figures showed Friday, underscoring the huge task leaders face to restore confidence in the continent’s economy.

Of course this doesn’t tell the regional story…..

In Spain, the jobless figure rose by another 0.2 points to reach 25.1 percent, the highest in the eurozone. For Greece, the latest data available was for May, which saw a 0.5-point increase to 23.1 percent. A year earlier, it was 16.8 percent.

Youth unemployment was even worse. In Spain it stood at 52.9 percent for people under 25 and at 53.8 percent in Greece.

At the other end of the scale in the eurozone, Germany, the continent’s biggest economy, had a rate of 5.5 percent. Its neighbor Austria had the lowest of all with 4.5 percent.

5.5 is still a bit high, I put the target at about 4% unemployment for a strong economy.

The burden of government spending in the U.K. rose from 36.5 percent of economic output in 2000 up to 48.7 percent of GDP today. This mostly happened under Labor Party rule, but the coalition of so-called Conservatives and Liberal Democrats that took power in 2010 hasn’t done much to restrain government spending.

o augment the damage, taxes also have been increasing. The feckless Gordon Brown of the Labor Party boosted the top tax rate to 50 percent (a disaster from a Laffer-Curve perspective) before getting evicted by voters.

The Tory-Lib Dem coalition is similarly bad. In recent years, the capital gains tax has been increased (see these amusing posters to understand why this was a foolish idea), along with a big hike in the value-added tax (though, to be fair, the corporate rate has been slightly reduced and part of Gordon Brown’s higher income tax rate has been repealed).

Yes, the moral duty to willingly acquiesce your earnings to a government which is such a good caretaker of the fruits of your labors. We hear this nonsense everywhere. I think there’s a train coming, we ought to move off of the tracks.

15 Responses to Well, No They Wouldn’t —- Bad Economy Or Parenting?

“Both Prime Minster David Cameron and one of his deputies have argued that people have a moral obligation to turn more of their income over to the government.”

Typical European conservative party; the German CDU has no problems with a public sector that eats half the GDP as well. They’re not much different from our socialists; they’re all statists.

Meanwhile I had two scoicalists in two weeks telling me the free market system has failed, one from Spain and one from Germany. It’s getting a little boring explaining to them that they have never lived in a free market system so instead I resort to asking them for the greatest Marxist success story they have. They then explain that they’re not communists, Marxists or so but some other flavor of leftist; and I ask them more questions to get them classified in the taxonomy of socialist flavors, which riles them up endlessly.

Oh, and they think Clint Eastwood has lost his marbles. I try not to get too smug; they have it hard.

Lol, yeh, that’s how they’re playing the Eastwood monologue, but I thought it was a great humorous skit, and his finish stated exactly what needed to be stated. We own our countries and the politicians are our employees. The world needs reminded of this.

And yes, there are too many claiming to be conservatives when they’re just statists like the rest of them.

Marc Faber also sees war at the end of this economic trail. He says emerging economies (like Brazil, China, New Zealand) will be the only ones not caught in the mess. Unfunded liabilities are killing America.

China would be front and center if aggressions are to break out. Some of the upheaval would likely come from within. While it doesn’t appear that much right now, China has some very huge challenges on the horizon. Plus the fact that they own a lot of U.S. and Europe’s debt.

‘Both Prime Minster David Cameron and one of his deputies have argued that people have a moral obligation to turn more of their income over to the government.’

Think we fought a war against them and that type of thinking a couple hundred years back or so. Whipped their butts, too, from what I understand. Which led to the creation of a nation that brought on the greatest uplifting of the human condition in history.